Rives: Reinventing the encyclopedia game

63,817 views ・ 2012-06-27

TED


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Translator: Morton Bast Reviewer: Thu-Huong Ha
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So, last month, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced
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that it is going out of print
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after 244 years, which made me nostalgic,
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because I remember playing a game with the colossal encyclopedia set in my hometown library
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back when I was a kid,
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maybe 12 years old.
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And I wondered if I could update that game,
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not just for modern methods,
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but for the modern me.
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So I tried.
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I went to an online encyclopedia,
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Wikipedia, and I entered the term "Earth."
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You can start anywhere, this time I chose Earth.
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And the first rule of the game is pretty simple.
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You just have to read the article
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until you find something you don't know,
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and preferably something your dad doesn't even know.
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And in this case, I quickly found this:
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The furthest point from the center of the Earth
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is not the tip of Mount Everest, like I might have thought,
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it's the tip of this mountain: Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.
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The Earth spins, of course, as it travels around the sun,
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so the Earth bulges a little bit around the middle,
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like some Earthlings.
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And even though Mount Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes,
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it's one degree away from the equator,
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it's riding that bulge, and so the summit of Chimborazo
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is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth.
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And it is really fun to say.
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So I immediately decided,
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this is going to be the name of the game,
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or my new exclamation.
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You can use it at TED.
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Chimborazo, right?
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It's like "eureka" and "bingo" had a baby.
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I didn't know that;
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that's pretty cool.
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Chimborazo!
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So the next rule of the game is also pretty simple.
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You just have to find another term and look that up.
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Now in the old days, that meant getting out a volume
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and browsing through it alphabetically,
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maybe getting sidetracked,
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that was fun.
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Nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from.
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I can go literally anywhere in the world,
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I think since I was already in Ecuador,
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I just decided to click on the word "tropical."
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That took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics
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that encircles the Earth.
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Now that's the Tropic of Cancer in the north
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and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south,
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that much I knew,
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but I was surprised to learn this little fact:
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Those are not cartographers' lines,
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like latitude or the borders between nations,
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they are astronomical phenomena caused by the Earth's tilt,
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and they change.
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They move; they go up, they go down.
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In fact, for years, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn
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have been steadily drifting towards the equator
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at the rate of about 15 meters per year,
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and nobody told me that.
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I didn't know it.
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Chimborazo!
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So to keep the game going, I just have to find another term and look that one up.
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Since I'm already in the tropics, I chose "Tropical rainforest."
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Famous for its diversity, human diversity.
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There are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet.
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They're all over the globe, but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests.
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This is the only place you can go nowadays and not get "friended."
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The link that I clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end.
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It mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then
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coleoptera,
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which turn out to be beetles.
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Now I clicked on this on purpose,
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but if I'd somehow gotten here by mistake,
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it does remind me, for the band, see "The Beatles,"
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for the car see "Volkswagon Beetle,"
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but I am here for beetle beetles.
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This is the most successful order on the planet by far.
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Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet,
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including plants, are beetles.
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That means the next time you are in the grocery store,
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take a look at the four people ahead of you in line.
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Statistically, one of you is a beetle.
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And if it is you, you are astonishingly well adapted.
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There are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums.
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There are predator beetles, that attack other insects
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and still look pretty cute to us.
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There are beetles that roll little balls of dung
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great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings.
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This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri,
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who renews the ball of the sun every morning,
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which is how that dung-rolling scarab
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became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
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Beetles, I was reminded, have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom.
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Fireflies are not flies, fireflies are beetles.
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Fireflies are coleoptera, and coleoptera communicate in other ways as well.
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Like my next link:
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The chemical language of pheromones.
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Now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex.
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Yeah.
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(Laughter)
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And the link to aphrodisiac.
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Now that's something that increases sexual desire,
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possibly chocolate.
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There is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine
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that might be an aphrodisiac.
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But as the article mentions,
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because of enzyme breakdown,
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it's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally.
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So those of you who only eat your chocolate, you might have to experiment.
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The link I clicked on here,
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"sympathetic magic," mostly because I understand what both of those words mean.
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But not when they're together like that.
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I do like sympathy. I do like magic.
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So when I click on "sympathetic magic,"
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I get sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls.
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This is the boy in me getting lucky again.
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Sympathetic magic is imitation.
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If you imitate something, maybe you can have an effect on it.
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That's the idea behind voodoo dolls, and possibly also cave paintings.
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The link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind.
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I would love to see Google maps inside some of these caves.
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We've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork.
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Common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands,
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usually the left hand.
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We have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia,
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so even though I don't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand
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or blow pigment on it from a tube,
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I can easily picture how he did it.
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And I really don't think it's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar
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right there that I'm going to use now to click on the term for "hand,"
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go to the page for "hand," where I found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia
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I've found in a long time. It's simply this:
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The back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar.
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Now that's embarrassing, because up until now,
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every time I've said, "I know it like the back of my hand,"
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I've really been saying, "I'm totally familiar with that,
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I just don't know it's freaking name, right?"
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And the link I clicked on here,
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well, lemurs, monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar.
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I click on chimpanzee, and I get our closest genetic relative.
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Pan troglodytes, the name we give him, means "cave dweller."
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He doesn't.
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He lives in rainforests and savannas.
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It's just that we're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us,
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evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us,
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and in some cases, he gets places before us.
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Like my next link, the almost irresistible link, Ham the Astrochimp.
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I click on him, and I really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice, in fact.
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He's born in Cameroon,
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which is smack in the middle of my tropics map,
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and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles.
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In between those two landmarks in Ham's life,
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he flew into space.
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He experienced weightlessness and re-entry
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months before the first human being to do it,
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Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
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When I click on Yuri Gagarin's page,
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I get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature,
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huge in heroism.
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Top estimates, Soviet estimates, put this guy at 1.65 meters,
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that is less than five and a half feet tall max,
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possibly because he was malnourished as a child.
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Germans occupied Russia.
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A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin household,
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and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut.
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Years later, the boy from that cramped mud hut
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would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule
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on the tip of a rocket
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who volunteered to be launched into outer space,
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the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet.
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And he didn't just leave it,
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he circled it once.
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Fifty years later, as a tribute,
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the International Space Station, which is still up there tonight,
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synced its orbit with Gagarin's orbit,
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at the exact same time of day,
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and filmed it,
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so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes
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of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride,
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possibly a lonely one,
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the first person to ever see such a thing.
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And then when you've had your fill of that,
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you can click on one more link.
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You can come back to Earth.
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You return to where you started.
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You can finish your game.
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You just need to find one more fact that you didn't know.
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And for me, I quickly landed on this one:
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The Earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid,
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which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls.
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This is the kind of fact I would have loved as a boy.
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I found it myself.
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It's got some math that I can do.
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I'm pretty sure my dad doesn't know it.
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What this means is that if you could shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball,
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if you could take planet Earth, with all its mountain tops and caves
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and rainforests, astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees, voodoo dolls,
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fireflies, chocolate, sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea,
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you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball,
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it would be as smooth as a billiard ball,
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presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle.
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That's pretty cool.
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I didn't know that.
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Chimborazo!
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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